Presidential hopeful and former Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Sec. Julian Castro released a new campaign ad on Wednesday accusing President Donald Trump of directly inciting the deadly mass shooting in El Paso, Texas.
“This morning I placed an ad on Fox & Friends in Bedminster, [New Jersey] to send a message to [Trump] on his vacation,” Castro wrote in a tweet. “Words have consequences and we’ve had enough.”
The 30-second television advertisement will be airing only for one day on Fox News and only in the media market around Trump National Golf Course where the president is vacationing for a couple of days. The ad is meant as an attempt to send a message directly to the president, who is known to frequently watch the network, and it cost the campaign $2,775, reported the Texas Tribune.
“President Trump, you referred to countries as ‘s**tholes.’ You urged American congresswomen to go back to where they came from. You called immigrants rapists,” Castro says in the ad. “As we saw in El Paso, Americans were killed because you stoked the fire of racists. Innocent people were shot down because they look different from you, because they look like me. They look like my family.”
“Words have consequences. Ya basta,” he added, using the Spanish slang for “enough.”
The ad comes nearly two weeks after back-to-back mass shootings were carried out only hours apart from one another. On August 3, a gunman open fired in an El Paso shopping center, murdering more than 20 individuals and injuring more than two dozen others. A second attacker took the lives of nine people and injured nearly 30 others after he gunned down people outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio, only hours later.
Castro, a vocal critic of Trump, has repeatedly claimed that the president is a racist and has ramped up his accusations in the wake of the deadly mass shootings.
“I agree that he’s stoked that kind of division, I agree that he’s a racist,” Castro replied when asked if he believes Trump is a white supremacist. “From everything I can tell, he seems to believe that white people are somehow above other people. Unfortunately, he believes that.”
While Castro has accused Trump of sowing division within the country, the former Obama official received his own backlash after he defended his brother, who also chairs his presidential campaign, for posting the names and employers of dozens of Trump donors.
“My brother put out a list of names of people who had maxed out the Trump campaign. That is public information. That information is put out all the time, and for anybody to pretend to suggest it’s not, that’s just untrue,” Castro said when asked about the doxxing. He further dodged answering whether his brother was attempting to intimidate Trump supporters, as well as what his brother’s motivations were for circulating the information.
Castro is polling below 1% on average against his Democratic primary challengers.